


turntable

by Zekkass



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Character Study, Female Steve Rogers, Flashbacks, Gen, Genderswap, Implied Steve/Bucky pining that never went beyond Steve thinking about it, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-01
Updated: 2013-06-01
Packaged: 2017-12-13 15:04:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/825678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zekkass/pseuds/Zekkass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I've been a girl before, Tony."</p>
            </blockquote>





	turntable

**Author's Note:**

> Tagging legete and jabber_moose for credit and thanks here. Without you two this thing wouldn't exist, and I like the idea too much to let it vanish with nary a word.

Steve still looks himself in the mirror sometimes and wonders who he is. After all, whoever he is now, it's a far cry from who he used to be, growing up in Brooklyn.

His own momma wouldn't recognize him now.

\--

Workplace hazards take on a new definition when he fights for the Avengers, and for SHIELD. It's still better than worrying if hair or fingers or clothes would get caught in machinery, back when he was healthy enough to take a daily wage from a factory job.

\--

The beam catches him square in the chest, and for seconds Steve's afraid he's going to melt or disintegrate or turn to stone, but instead he glows, doubles over with a sudden spike of heat and pain, and when the glow fades, Steve feels different.

There's not really time to stop and find out what it did to him, not when Hammond has aimed his beam at Hawkeye, and instead Steve lets his shield fly.

"I'm fine," he reports over the comms as Hawkeye finishes up the AIM scientist with his bola arrows. There's relief and questions from the team, but he doesn't have answers yet, except for what he told them: he feels fine.

By the time they've secured the area Steve realizes what's happened to him.

He's not male anymore.

However that beam did it, Steve's female.

Again.

\--

It should have been obvious, from the way her uniform was tighter in the wrong areas, but here are two facts: Steve would need another decade before she'd be entirely comfortable in her own skin, after the serum, and she often wears tight undershirts, or t-shirts in her off-hours.

That, and she'd been distracted by rounding up Hammond and the rest of the AIM goons.

\--

The team is understandably concerned and curious.

"Don't worry, Cap, we'll find a way to change you back," says Tony as he lands near her. "And until then we'll find someone to teach you how to be a girl."

Steve just shakes her head. "Any injuries?"

"Got some nice bruises," Clint speaks up as he gets up from checking the handcuffs. "But I'm fine - what'd that thing do to you - whoa!"

Steve just raises an eyebrow and waits for it.

"Breasts," Clint says, and tries again. "I mean, you're a girl. I mean, you're fine."

"Thanks, Hawkeye. Very informative," Tony says, elbowing him.

Steve just turns away to greet the approaching Natasha instead of responding to that, and it's in a quieter tone that's Steve's not meant to hear (they forget how sharp his hearing is) that Tony says "Thanks for having the teenage boy reaction before I did."

Part of being a leader is knowing when to turn a blind eye or ear to your follower's activities. This, Steve thinks, is one of those times.

Natasha, to her relief, is as professional as ever.

After Hammond and his cronies have been transported to the quinjet, after the gun that changed her has been confiscated, after they've disabled this facility, Steve finally allows herself the personal moment to think about the repercussions if this is a permanent change.

"How're you holding up, Cap?" Tony, naturally, chooses this moment to check on her.

"I'm fine," she tells him, not unaware that both Clint and Natasha can hear them from the cockpit, and not unaware that their AIM captives can likely hear them as well. Still, it is the truth. She is fine.

The look Tony gives her - he doesn't believe it.

So she smiles a little, gestures to herself. "I've been a girl before, Tony."

That nets her silence, and when she looks towards the cockpit both Clint and Natasha have turned their heads to get a look at her.

"Uh, when?" Tony asks.

She thinks back to the stunned silence as she'd come out of that capsule alive and almost more importantly _male_. She thinks back to the senator that had jumped on the idea of selling that she'd always been 'Steven' Rogers. She thinks back to how only a few people had known that she used to be a girl.

It hadn't been a detail she'd given to SHIELD, for no other reason than it was in her past, and irrelevant now.

But now it is relevant, and now there's no reason to hide the truth.

"The name on my birth certificate was Stella Grant Rogers," she says.

You could drop a pin.

Even the AIM goons are staring.

Clint breaks the silence with an "um."

"The serum," she says. "Unexpected side-effect. No one realized it would change my gender along with everything else."

"...Huh," Tony says. He looks her up and down, then shrugs. "Guess we don't have to look for a way to change you back after all."

Natasha gives a little nod and turns her attentions back to the controls of the plane.

Clint clears his throat. "Do we still call you Steve? Or are you Stella now or what?"

It's an easy, if painful answer: she can't bring herself to think of herself as Stella again, not if this isn't permanent. "I'm still Steve," she says, then asks "Can we save any more questions for after we've dropped our guests off?"

"Sure, Cap," Tony says. He's uncomfortable; there's a subtle shift to his stance, to his tone, to his expression. She can't quite put a finger on what specifically is wrong, but: it's something to remember for later, when she can speak to him privately.

Steve's not planning on making a big deal out of this. Not for herself nor for anyone else - she's female, and if Natasha's anything to go by it shouldn't make a lick of difference to any of their coworkers. The optimist in her likes to think so, at least.

\--

If the change is permanent, she can ask the scientists to find a way to reverse it. If the change isn't permanent - she'll adjust. She'd resigned herself to being Steve Rogers for the rest of her life, and to be honest it wasn't a burden, to gain a penis.

Not in exchange for everything else - health, the chance to do some meaningful good for her country, and later the chance to save Bucky.

There were and are other benefits, too, and she doesn't know yet if she'll retain them in this future, if she stays female.

She buys a box of pads on the way home, and counts that as missing benefit number one.

\--

An empty home gives her more and more time to think.

She thinks about Bucky, and how he'd accepted the change so easily. So she wasn't scrawny or female anymore, he hadn't cared, except to laugh at the Captain America thing, to almost break something laughing about it.

He'd taught her how to be a guy, how to be unselfconscious around other men, what social norms were expected of her then.

As always the first thing to flash to mind when she thinks of Bucky teaching her how to be a guy is the way he'd look at her sometimes, and how he couldn't meet her eyes.

The next memory is a lighter one, a reminder of good times during that war, when they'd found a river and a safe time for the whole group of them to go skinny-dipping.

Steve remembers how she'd had trouble looking at so many naked men, remembers how Morita had led the charge to dunk her, remembers drying off on the bank of the river next to Bucky, sunning themselves in a rare moment of peace.

It's a good memory, one of the many she holds onto from that time.

\--

Later in the evening Steve sits and thinks back to a day a long time ago when she'd been listening to firecrackers in the streets as the borough celebrated the Fourth of July. She'd been sitting on the stoop with Bucky, not kid enough anymore to want any of the lights to play with and it was money better spent elsewhere, anyways.

"Speaking of birthdays," Bucky was saying. "when _is_ yours? You've never told."

Or celebrated it openly, and for good reason. How could she tell Bucky that she was born today?

She lifts her shoulders in a shrug and looks further up at the sky, just able to pick out the bursts of light that would be fireworks.

"Don't tell me it's a Christmas birthday," Bucky says, and that makes her laugh.

"It's not a winter birthday," she tells him.

"Then when is it?"

"You're gonna laugh if I tell you."

"No I won't," Bucky lies through his teeth, and she shoves a little at his shoulder, friendly-like.

"Yeah, you will."

"Why don't we find out? Just tell me, Stella."

She's probably blushing as she says it. "It's today."

It takes him a few seconds to run through surprise and realization and then he starts laughing, and keeps laughing, and Stella just sighs.

It's her name, she knows, not just the date. Stella means star, and America's got forty-eight stars on her flag.

"Little Miss Stars-and-Striped-Garters," says Bucky, and she could hit him as he keeps laughing.

It's times like these when he's all lit up and happy that make her wish she were anything more than something like a sister to him, but it's times like these when he's being a jerk that she's glad she can give him a shove and get up in a huff, and it doesn't mean anything more than exasperation.

"Sorry," he says, catching air as he gets up with her. "It's funny."

Okay, maybe it is. She shakes her head anyways, smiling.

"Happy birthday," he tells her, as sincere as he ever is.

That's how she remembers him, how she'll always remember him.

She freeze-frames the memory there, tucks it back in with the rest of them, and gets up from her chair. She has to sleep sometime tonight, has to let it all go so she will be rested for the morning.

\--

Minutes naked in the bathroom, staring in the mirror, trying to convince herself that the face she sees belongs to Steve Rogers.

Minute changes to her facial features, nothing obvious, nothing overt. A moment on her way home, seeing herself reflected in a storefront's windows: she hadn't realized anything was different until memory and knowledge kicked in.

Now here, under bright lights and in a clear mirror the changes should be obvious, but she has to actively picture Steve Rogers' male face and layer it over the one she sees now.

(She'll never stop expecting to see someone else in the mirror; someone not nearly as strong.)

It's still wrong. She still sees a stranger in the mirror.

That's why it's so easy to accept the changes, at least as an immediate. She hasn't been at home in her skin since the summer of '43.

Steve cups her breasts, runs a careful hand between her legs. Pinches her thighs, rests a hand on her flat stomach. She isn't bony anymore, and she's still as muscular as she was yesterday.

This body will at best be as much home as her male one was, given time. At least has some of the same features as the ones she was born with.

(There is a bitter taste in her mouth as she turns over the thought that she might in some corner of her mind want to be small and sickly and weak again.)

\--

In the morning she picks up the phone and dials and asks "I need to spar with someone" after greeting Natasha.

Steve doesn't always spar with Natasha, but she considers matches with her to be the most informative sessions she'll have. Yes, she outmatches Natasha in speed, stamina, and strength, but she's not the Hulk. Brute strength won't win her every fight, and Natasha makes up for everything else with trained grace and skill.

If (god forbid) she loses the serum she would again turn to Natasha to help teach her those same qualities.

The idea of this fight is simply to teach her to become comfortable in her body.

Natasha's there at the gym at the appointed time, water bottle in hand.

"How," a slight, subtle pause. "are you?"

"I'm fine," Steve answers. "Nothing seems to be changing back, so I'd better start getting used to this."

There are questions that Natasha doesn't ask, instead setting her things aside and ducking under the ropes into the ring.

Steve follows her in, puts her dukes up, and fights.

\--

It takes four rounds before Steve's confident that she could go into battle with her new center of gravity. Her reach is the same as it was, and her stamina is still the same.

It's not as different as she'd thought it would be.

As she helps Natasha up from the mat she wonders what her mother would think of her now.


End file.
